We'll put it to the test by using it to parse through the HTML that makes up a sample web page, and see how different commands in Beautiful Soup can retrieve the elements we request from that web page. With this beginning section of the Beautiful Soup tutorial, we'll install the Beautiful Soup module for Python. W3 has a great introduction to HTML and C odecademy can help you out for this as well. Both Codecademy and Lynda (which you can access with an NYPL card) have intro exercises for Python that would take a few hours to complete which will give you enough of a background for this (and be useful in other ways). It's intended for people who have some idea of how those languages are structured, just not what to do to create a web-scraping script. You'll want to know the basics of both HTML and Python for this tutorial. However, if your script is set to ask it for too much information too quickly, it might be disconnected for creating a strain on the server. Some sites block you from web-scraping, but most do not. If you know the URLs for each of the albums on the song lyric site, and know from looking at developer tools that the lyrics are always between tags labeled 'lyrics', then you can write a script that takes goes to those URLs, copies all the information in between tags that say 'lyrics' and writes it to a text file for you. But if they were stored in a separate page for each song, that cut and paste method would take an unnecessarily long time. The good news is, most sites have a template that they use when making multiple pages, and you can use BeautifulSoup to pull the information from that template, and print it to your Python console or put it into a text file. If the lyrics were stored on a web page as a whole album, you'd be in luck, and would only need to spend a few minutes copying and pasting the lyrics. It lets you automate the process of obtaining data from the web rather than doing it manually.įor example, you may be looking to collect all the song lyrics of an artist so you can do a word frequency count. Web-scraping is the term for creating a program that will visit one or more webpages, and copy whatever information from the pages that is specified in the code. BeautifulSoup is a web-scraping language created for Python.
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